SEVEN - THE GYMNOPÉDIE
The car came to a halt in the back of the car park. None of the spots near the escalators were available so the old white SUV parked under an overhang, just enough space for the driver to tuck the nose of the car in. Robert begrudgingly opened the door, his knee creaking as his leg braced for the full weight of his body. He less leapt out of the car and more slid to contact with the ground. Robert let out a sigh, his hands rummaging around in his pockets, taking a mental checklist.
‘Wallet?’
‘Yep.’
‘Padlock?’
‘Yep.’
‘Mobile.’
‘Hope it’s got charge.’
‘Earphones.’
‘Tangled with my keys.’
‘Will to do this?’
‘Non-existent. No exclamation mark.’
‘Better lock the fuckin’ car.’
‘Yep.’
The Beep bounces off the close walls.
‘Fuck.’
‘What now?’
‘Fuckin’ towel.’
‘Fuck, now I’m asking myself what’s wrong.’
Again, the Beep resounds off the walls as Robert reaches for the backdoor handle, opening the door and grabbing his towel.
Beep.
Robert trudges through the car park, carefully avoiding the cars as he shimmies through, his towel over his shoulders. Robert’s wife had signed him on to the gym using some rewards program linked to their frequent shopper points or some union reward card. He couldn’t remember, nor did he care to remember, it was just another inane conversation that took away time in an already busy day. It was one of the cumbersome details that really had no bearing on his day to day existence, except that at this point, him needing a gym membership was made all the more cheap by his wife’s infinite knowledge of all things in the tangled web of life.
Robert’s mind began ticking over, what would he do, lower or upper body, how many repetitions, should he warm up or just blast out the weights?
‘Fuck, no more than an hour, might spend it on the bike.’
Robert came to the top of the escalator and on one side was the gym, the other a coffee shop. A slight sense of delight tingled in his heart, a coffee would be great. Then he saw the sign, his eyes running over words as bright as the sun.
‘Protein shakes sold here.’
‘Fuck, that sucks.’
Robert walked through the automatic doors to the gym, his mesh shorts, a reminder of another life where he played a bit of basketball, riding up into his crotch. Robert couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t worn tailored shorts. T-shirts, yes. Not this generic Nike shirt that his wife had purchased for his new gym adventure. No, he wore the T-shirts that Dads wore, of bands no kids had ever heard of, or movie characters that said cool stuff and never left a trail of utter destruction. Of course, those were exactly the kind of T-shirts that would have marked him as an outsider at…
‘THE GYM.’
The words seemed to always come with an emphasis. Because THE GYM was where it all happened and a whole life could rebound from listlessness and too many calories of the amber persuasion.
Robert had put on a few kilos. Well, maybe more than a few, but that happens, between work and the kids, you eat on the run. A routine blood test revealed some potential issues with cholesterol and high blood sugar. Robert had offered to eat better, but…
‘THE WIFE.’
She was now taking on a larger presence in his health issues, certainly larger than he had wanted, all of which ended with her making him go to THE GYM.
Robert looked around.
‘Is she? Could she be watching?’ he thought to himself.
‘Nah, she’s got the kids.’
‘Maybe her ears are burning!!’
The automatic doors opened and a gush of airconditioned goodness blasted Robert in the face. He squinted, the cold air was as uncomfortable to his body as the haphazard lighting was to his eyes, as the horrible music was to his ears.
‘Kill me now.’
Robert saw the front counter and then the border patrol set up to actually enter the gym.
“Hello,” Robert heard, teeth shining from behind the counter before the whole human being emerged into his line of sight. Robert had seen her type before, all tight bodied in lycra, her hair pulled so far back that if she had any wrinkles they were as hidden as her real age was, if she really had an age, or was just perpetually beautiful and energetic because she worked at THE GYM.
“How can I help you?” she asked with the enthusiasm that only comes when someone is part of a cult.
“First time here, my wife signed me up.”
“Excellent, do you have your pass?”
Robert dug the pass out of his over-filled wallet. No one used wallets anymore, Robert had observed. He wondered if the girl behind the counter was internally laughing at the old-before-his-time, one-time-dude in front of her.
The girl ran the card through the scanner, a light went green at the gate and she motioned him to come in.
“You’re really lucky today, there’s no one else here.”
The girl motioned for Robert to follow her.
Somewhere in the dirty old man part of his mind Robert thought about what could be, as the girl walked before him.
“I’m Candace, I’m the manager here.”
‘Really’ thought Robert.
“Lockers are in the toilets, have you got a padlock?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent.”
‘That word again.’
“Put whatever you don’t need into a locker and I’ll show you around.”
“Thanks,” spoke Robert, not sure if he could really stomach Candace showing him the ropes.
He found himself a locker and put in everything but the padlock, key, mobile, earphones and towel. The toilet had no trough, just stalls and more mirrors than he had seen in a long time. He half expected to catch someone in there, sans shorts striking a pose, no doubt with a mobile phone at the ready to capture the intimate selfie they felt sure the world couldn’t live without. Thankfully Robert was saved the embarrassment; there really was no one there. The entire gym was at his disposal, for the moment anyway.
Robert looked at himself, his sunken eyes, his languid skin, the bony arms, the paunch.
‘Fuck,’ he thought to himself, ‘I really do need to do something.’
And with that Robert walked from the toilets; he would jump on something that Candace recommended.
‘Hopefully her!’
Robert laughed inside. It had become rare for him to just find things funny, just funny, without having to apply a level of sarcasm that was extending to every interaction in his life. Robert took a physical and emotional breath. There was more here than just his physical health, he was so far from the man he used to be, he could see it in people’s eyes, the wariness, the distance that they now approached him with. He wanted to claw with everything he was, just to be that person he used to be, once again.
Candace had, surprisingly to Robert, waited for him to emerge. Robert couldn’t even conjure up a dirty thought, he needed to sweat.
“So, as you can see…” started Candace, but Robert politely cut her off, his eyes surveying this new domain.
“I’m going to go on the bike for a while, get really warmed up.”
“Oh yeah,” Candace said enthusiastically with a wide smile, “that’s always a great way to get warm and loosen up.”
“Cheers,” said Robert as he headed to the bike closest to the biggest television monitor.
Robert could see it was a music video that didn’t match the music being played in the gym, which soon wouldn’t match the music in his earphones. Taking his towel, Robert wiped down the seat. Judging the height of it, he decided it would need to go up a fair bit.
Pulling the pin and turning the knob did no good except that the whole bike came off the ground. Moving to the next bike, Robert found it much easier to make the necessary adjustments. Rocking backwards and forwards, with his feet on the pedals, Robert felt comfortable. Next came music. He got his earphones out, pushed them into his ears, plugged them into his phone. Despite being alone, Robert put his towel on his head to create further isolation while he exercised.
Thumbing through his choices, scrolling through the lifetime of baggage that every band or song represented, he searched for something that he could enjoy. Songs flashed past, each one infused with a memory of better times. Of course, these days it was all blank looks from a population force-fed on television singing contests for over a decade and a half. From over-acting judges to big red buttons and swivelling chairs or whatever other ridiculous gimmick the television producers had come up with to sell the same stale concept one more time, a concept that had very little to do with music. Packaging, that was all it was, the equivalent of a shrink-wrapped hologram cover on a nineties comic book with the words ‘collector’s edition’ in bold red. Except that these were real people, hapless children bought and sold on the seductive lie that the only way to be worthwhile was to be on television, singing pale imitation cover versions of songs that were once powerful, debasing them of their originality, their creativity, sucking them dry until each shining talisman was just one more product in a long production line of commodities. The kids weren’t ‘selling out’ anymore, they had already sold their souls so long ago they didn’t even know how it could possibly be any different.
When your days are defined by the self-proclaimed successes of the mediocre, the threat of finally relenting and letting your wings spread free to envelop the world may be more than others can endure. Sometimes silence brought the only joy Robert could know, a moment of gravity, a realisation lost on those not meek enough to know that not a babe, but a giant, stands in reckoning. Then again, sometimes that ‘silence’ took the form of music, blazing out of a past that shouldn’t feel so long ago, back when things felt real. When there were real things to feel.
Robert watched them slide by on the screen of his phone, talisman markers of a purer world. In Bloom. Man in the Box. Jesus Christ Pose. Breed. No Excuses. Black Hole Sun. But then something occurred to him as he looked for the perfect selection to block out the world and insulate him in his new gym adventure. Kurt Cobain had died in 1994. Layne Staley had died in 2002. Chris Cornell had died in 2017. He was filling his head with the voices of dead men.
‘Fuck,’ Robert thought, ‘when did I get so fucking old.’
He hit the button on Superunknown and let the familiar sound of Let Me Drown wash over him as his legs started pumping the pedals. Up and down, up and down. He was sweating within moments, puffing noticeably, but that didn’t stop him. Robert pushed harder, even as his legs started to ache, then pushed harder again as his lungs seared. ‘Screw them all’, he thought, ‘every last one of them.’ And that sentiment at least brought a half smile to the corner of his mouth.
As he pedalled on, head nodding in time to the beat of the music blasting through his earphones, Robert gradually became aware of the images flashing past on the screen in front of him. When he had been setting up the bike, the big TV screen in front had seemed to be playing some sort of music video, flouncy boy band vomit that he could only be glad wasn’t synched to the speakers feeding the gym around him. But the effete teen idols seemed to have been replaced with some other footage, and it took Robert a while to decide whether or not it was some new music video or something else. He kept waiting for some barely clad guy or gal to thrust their way onto the screen, with pent up emotion on their face and rhythmic hip thrusts gyrating their lower bodies even as some wind machine tossed back their hair. When none of those things happened, he started to pay a bit more attention to what was on the screen, curiosity getting the better of him.
It appeared to be a forest, European style with tangled, gnarled branches and trees that looked to be older than some of the more modern countries. It was dark in the forest, seemingly lit only by a full moon shining bright from somewhere far above. What was strange was that it seemed to be filmed first person, as if it were documenting a path filmed by a camera-man (‘heh, ok, let’s not be sexist – camera-person’) as they trudged through the gothic landscape. What was stranger though, Robert realised, was that the pace seemed to match the pace at which he was pedalling the exercise bike. Experimentally he slowed down on the pedals. Instantly the pace of the images on the screen slowed as well. Robert sped up, pedalling for all he was worth, watching astonished as the branches whipped past on the screen at an accelerated rate, rocketing by in a way that made him feel as if he himself was riding through that landscape.
‘Of course,’ he realised, shaking his head in bemused self-deprecation, ‘this is some new-fangled gym thing – sign up for a year’s membership today and you can cycle through the forests of Europe without ever leaving your exercise bike, or some such gimmicky thing.’ Still, for all that, he quite liked it. Settling back into a regular pace, Robert watched the screen intently, for a split-second feeling like he really was there, riding through some dark place on the outskirts of the known world. It felt calming somehow, as if he was at home there, in that place beyond places. Away from the banality of the modern world. For once, something real. Somewhere real. At that moment though, he noticed something that made his heart beat faster and a cold sweat broke out all over his body. There was someone there, in the forest, up ahead. Someone… or some thing… He saw a crouched figure amidst the tangled trees, bone white face somehow horribly stretched, large ears and sunken eyes turned toward him. He couldn’t see it clearly yet, it was still too far away, but as he rode the bike he found he was getting closer and closer to it, and whatever it was, that thing was rising up, getting taller and larger, its arms cast wide, either to welcome him in an embrace or to smother him with darkness… Robert gave an involuntary yelp of fright and instinctively leapt off the bike, flailing as he did so, hitting the ground unceremoniously and landing in a pile of aching, sweaty limbs. The towel he had had about his head fell forward and obscured his vision for a moment and he panicked, batting at it, for some reason thinking that the creature would be there, hovering above him. Instead as the towel fell away, he found Candace, leaning down and mouthing words that he couldn’t hear, blocked by the sounds of Fell on Black Days blaring through his earphones. He quickly swept them out of his ears, noticing that Candace looked equal parts annoyed and concerned, perhaps landing slightly more on the side of annoyed.
“…equipment like that,” she was saying, “you’re lucky there are no other patrons here today, you could have seriously hurt someone, if not yourself with that reckless…”
“Sorry,” Robert muttered, “it was that damn video, there was…”
But as he turned to gesture towards the screen he saw that it was now showing some flouncy boy band and their friendly wind machine, lip synching to a different tune than the equally awful one that was currently belting out across the gym’s speakers.
“Sorry…” Robert muttered again, picking up himself and whatever shreds of his dignity he could salvage while Candace looked on disapprovingly. As soon as she retreated to her desk once again, Robert retreated to the cardio area, making sure that he was facing away from the TV screen, taking a moment to slow his breathing. ‘Geez, it was nothing old man,’ he thought determinedly, pasting over the simmering fear that still bubbled inside him, ‘you’re jumping at shadows, that’s all, scared of a damn TV screen.’ After a few rounds on the weight machines he managed to convince himself of how foolish he had been. ‘No way am I telling THE WIFE about falling off the exercise bike,’ he mused. He looked around the empty gym, wondering idly why he was still the only person there. ‘Ah well, my lucky day I guess,’ he smiled inwardly. ‘So, bike, weights… how do we wrap up this little session.’ The answer was obvious of course, a brief jog on the treadmill. But that meant returning to within view of the TV screen. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Robert scolded himself, ‘the boy bands are more frightening than anything else they could show on there anyway!’
As he stepped up onto the treadmill Robert noticed that the gym’s desk was unattended and wondered where Candace had gone to. Not that he needed her for anything anyway, everything here basically ran itself. He selected a speed and angle of incline and hit ‘go’, feeling the conveyor belt start to spin beneath his feet. Before he knew it, he was jogging steadily, enjoying the feel of his body moving in time with The Day I Tried to Live. Robert suddenly realised that he’d been keeping his head down, eyes averted from the TV screen all this time. ‘Ridiculous,’ he scoffed, ‘what do I have to be scared of here?’ And he turned his gaze upward to glance at the big screen.
It happened so quickly he hardly had time to react. He saw that the screen was once again showing the twisted forest, but this time there was a figure jogging on the path through the gnarled trees. He gasped in sudden recognition – that figure on the screen, it was him, right down to the brand new generic Nike shirt. He was momentarily distracted by the sight of the increasing bald patch at the back of his head. ‘Does it really look that bad?’ Then, before he could even consider how or why, he was no longer looking at a TV screen showing an image of him running through the forest. Suddenly he was really there, in the forest, running.
The sudden silence alerted Robert to the fact that he no longer had his earphones in his ears. He skidded to a halt, noticing the soft dark soil of the path beneath his feet skuff about his sneakers as he did so. The gnarled fingers of the trees seemed to be reaching out towards him from every side, the full moon overhead casting long shadows.
‘It can’t be real,’
Robert thought frantically, his heart hammering in his chest.
‘It can’t be real!’
He reached out a hand and touched a nearby branch, feeling the sharp rough of the bark beneath his fingers, hearing the resistant creak of the tree as he applied pressure to it.
‘IT CAN’T BE REAL!!’
Then he heard another sound in the otherwise silent forest. A kind of shuffling, like some animal pushing through the undergrowth. It was somewhere behind him. Coming closer. Closer.
Robert didn’t remember deciding to run, he just found himself doing it, pounding forward along the path as quickly as he could, his heart hammering a staccato in his ears far louder and faster than the sound of his feet. Still, even over the sound of his increasingly ragged breath, he could still hear the strange scratching, shambling sound behind him, getting closer and closer. He pushed on frantically, the branches catching and cutting at his face as his run became a wild panic, arms flailing before him as he desperately pushed onward, no conscious thought in his head now, only fear, just the desperate need for flight filling his head. Then he rounded a corner and came out into a clearing, lit bright by the light of the screaming moon above, skidding to a halt, eyes wide at the tableau before him.
They were piled high at the centre of the clearing. Some had obviously been there some time, now little more than bones and rags. Others were newer, some scraps of decomposing flesh still clinging to the corpses. More than the bodies themselves, he recognised what they wore; the hardly worn sneakers, the newly bought T-shirts, the paraphernalia of the gym’s newest recruits. The pile was so high there was no way to count the number; the bodies seemed to tower above him, as though in danger of eclipsing the moon itself. Robert stood staring, frozen by fear, unable to move or think. Then he heard it enter the clearing behind him.
He saw the teeth shining in the light of the moon long before the whole being emerged into his line of sight. He had the impression of a bone white face, horribly stretched, large ears and sunken eyes, impossibly wide arms stretching out towards him. And that mouth, twisting open wide in a snarling smile of pure hunger. “The only bad workout is no workout,” the creature said in a voice like razor blades. “You’ve got to hustle to gain more muscle.” Robert tried to will himself to move, but his legs were jelly and all he managed was a single aborted step before his knees buckled and he fell face forward into the dirt of the forest clearing. Frantically he spun about, trying to crawl, doing anything he could to get away. But then he felt its hand wrap about his ankle, dragging him back towards its hungry maw. “Push harder today if you want a different tomorrow,” came its grating cry, but all Robert saw was its teeth, and all he heard was his own screaming, echoing loudly in his pounding ears…
The phone rang once. Twice. On the third ring her hand reached down and removed it from its cradle. “Hello, how can I help you?” she asked with the kind of enthusiasm that only comes from someone who is part of a cult. “Membership for your husband? Why of course,” Candace spoke into the receiver, licking her lips as she did so. “You’re very lucky, I’ve just had a vacancy open up…”